SEARCHENGINES
Google Corrects Andrew Yang & Ramesh Srinivasan On How Search Works
Danny Sullivan, the Google Search Liaison, responded to Andrew Yang, the businessman, attorney, lobbyist and political candidate and Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor, that they are wrong on how Google Search works. It is actually shocking how wrong Ramesh Srinivasan is and how confident he was when describing it.
Here is the video clip that Andrew Yang, who most of you might recognize from his the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, interview with Ramesh Srinivasan:
Why and how does Google show different people different search results? Now on https://t.co/PjWTwI77T1 Prof Ramesh Srinivasan @rameshmedia author of “Beyond the Valley” talks social media and democracy in the developing world, data rights, online echo chambers, and more. pic.twitter.com/PfcpOFkHwi
— Andrew Yang🧢⬆️🇺🇸 (@AndrewYang) March 8, 2022
As you can hear, Ramesh saying “so when they [Google] started doing this personalization stuff, what happened is we became googled and we became googled not based on sort of a sort of some sort of neutral notion of relevance but based on what would grab our attention. And the way that works, which I think is really interesting, is it’s all based on correlation. So you know if you Andrew yang have looked at you know a million web pages and I have all this data about your engagement on those different web pages which we call documents in the information sciences and then I have very similar profile to you it will recommend content to me based on correlation mapping.”
He goes on but in short, Google does not personalize results like this. Google has been saying for years and years that what personalization it does do is extremely light and is mostly (a) location based personalization and (b) immediate previous search personalization. So if you are in NYC and search for pizza, Google will show you pizza stores near you. If you first searched for football and then searched for Panthers, Google might show you the football team over the animal. But Google has been saying it doesn’t use personalization in a way that creates filter bubbles.
So Danny Sullivan responded on Twitter to this saying “Our search results at Google are not personalized in the way that’s described. Two people searching for the same thing in the same location will largely see the same results.”
Our search results at Google are not personalized in the way that’s described. Two people searching for the same thing in the same location will largely see the same results. This explains more: https://t.co/dc0Qbjp8JL
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 8, 2022
We don’t have one single algorithm that runs. We’re pretty transparent about general things our systems aim for — our How Search Works site is a good place to start: https://t.co/O65v1PTehr and see especially https://t.co/OfHNBK6oHl
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 8, 2022
There’s also content we share in these places:https://t.co/MPfQyYiDFOhttps://t.co/msqEFlIykD
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 8, 2022
I’m sorry you found those results from that search in 2017 not useful. But the assumption you made in that article that the results were somehow uniquely tailored to your interests — that’s not how Search results are generated.
— Danny Sullivan (@dannysullivan) March 8, 2022
Yes, personalization, can mean many different things if we take the term outside of Google’s opaque definition of such. Location, language, etc. are all examples of a different level of personalization from one standpoint. But again the point made in the article stands.
— Ramesh Srinivasan (@rameshmedia) March 8, 2022
Yes again that is how Google defines personalization but the term has a range of other meanings for the rest of us. I look fwd to hearing from your colleague/s so Google can communicate more clearly with the public on these issues.
— Ramesh Srinivasan (@rameshmedia) March 8, 2022
There was a time in 2007 Google tried personalization in a deeper way but that didn’t last too long and Google discontinued it because they didn’t find it useful for search ranking purposes.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Again Says Ignore Link Spam Especially To 404 Pages
I am not sure how many times Google has said that you do not need to disavow spammy links, that you can ignore link spam attacks and that links pointing to pages that 404/410 are links that do not count – but John Mueller from Google said it again.
In a thread on X, John Mueller from Google wrote, “if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped.” “They do nothing,” he added, “If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link.”
John then added, “I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.”
Asking if it would hurt to disavow, after responding with the messages above, John wrote:
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
Earlier this year we had tons of SEOs notice spammy links to 404 error pages, John said ignore them. In 2021, Google said links to 404 pages do not count, Google also said that in 2012 and many other times.
Plus, outside of links to 404 pages, Google has said to ignore spammy links, time and time again – even the toxic links – ignore them. The messaging around this changed in 2016 when Penguin 4.0 was released and Google began devaluing links over demoting them.
Here are those new posts in context:
I’d say add both. Lol
— Jeremy Rivera (@JeremyRiveraSEO) April 11, 2024
Sure. But also, save yourself the work completely :-).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
Re-reading your initial post – if the links are going to URLs that 404 on your site, they’re already dropped. They do nothing. If there’s no indexable destination URL, there’s no link. I’d generally ignore link-spam, and definitely ignore link-spam to 404s.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
… but still… is this a dumb idea?
— Rebekah Edwards (@rebekah_creates) April 11, 2024
It will do absolutely nothing. I would take the time to rework a holistic & forward-looking strategy for the site overall instead of working on incremental tweaks (other tweaks might do something, but you probably need real change, not tweaks).
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2024
And in general, Google says it ignores spammy links, so you should too (not new) but this post from John Mueller is:
I would just ignore them, Google ignores them too. Sometimes they’re just more visible in tools, but that doesn’t mean they’re a problem.
— John 🧀 … 🧀 (@JohnMu) April 18, 2024
And then also on Mastodon wrote about a similar situation, “Google has 2 decades of practice of ignoring spammy links. There’s no need to do anything for those links.”
Forum discussion at X.
Note: This was pre-written and scheduled to be posted today, I am currently offline for Passover.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Needs Very Few Links To Rank Pages; Links Are Less Important
Gary Illyes from Google spoke at the SERP Conf on Friday and he said what he said numerous times before, that Google values links a lot less today than it did in the past. He added that Google Search “needs very few links to rank pages.”
Gary reportedly said, “We need very few links to rank pages… Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
I am quoting Patrick Stox who is quoting what he heard Gary say on stage at the event. Here is Patrick’s post where Gary did a rare reply:
I shouldn’t have said that… I definitely shouldn’t have said that
— Gary 鯨理/경리 Illyes (so official, trust me) (@methode) April 19, 2024
Gary said this a year ago, also in 2022 and other times as well. We previously covered that Google said links would likely become even less important in the future. And even Matt Cutts, the former Googler, said something similar about eight years ago and the truth is, links are weighted a lot less than it was eight years ago and that trend continues. A couple of years ago, Google said links are not the most important Google search ranking factor.
Of course, many SEOs think Google lies about this.
Judith Lewis interviewed Gary Illyes at the SERP Conf this past Friday.
SEARCHENGINES
Google Core Update Flux, AdSense Ad Intent, California Link Tax & More
For the original iTunes version, click here.
The Google March 2024 core update is still rolling out, almost 6 weeks now, and we saw two shifts of ranking volatility, both mid-week and the weekend before. Google’s Danny Sullivan went on the defensive on search quality and forum listings in the search results. Google’s site reputation abuse spam policy will be fought both algorithmically and through manual actions. Google responded to The Verge mocking its search rankings over best printer. Google Search Console has a new unused ownership tokens page. Some sites may see the Google Indexing API work for a limited time on unsupported content types. And having two sites won’t result in your sites search ranking decline. BingBot now fully supports Brotli compression and will test Zstd compression soon. Google Search is testing thumbs-up and down buttons for product carousels. Google is testing new sitelinks designs. Google Notes on Search may not go away in May. Google Maps no longer supports draft reviews. Google Maps released a bunch of new maps, directions, travel and EV features. Google Ads Demand Gen campaigns now support AI image generation. Google Ads is testing a similar product carousel. Google Ads reminds advertisers that ad customizers are going away. Google Ads is testing a new horizontal ad card format. Google AdSense has these new ad intent formats. Google AdSense publishers are reporting lower RPM earnings since mid-February. Google threatens to drop links to California news publishers amongst link tax bill. That was the search news this week at the Search Engine Roundtable.
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